Ben BayerWe are happy to publish an excerpt from Ben Bayer’s article “Ayn Rand Knew Free Trade and National Security Were Allies,” originally published by the Southern California News Group on May 18, 2025. A longer version of this article with more archival evidence of Ayn Rand’s position on free trade will be published in New Ideal on May 21, 2025.
Famously a champion of capitalism, Rand saw free trade as the mechanism by which capitalism ensured international peace. Individuals free to produce and trade have no interest in war with their trading partners, and the spread of that freedom increases their security. Here Rand cited the relative absence of global war in the nineteenth century.
With her eyes on history, Rand confidently skewered the enemies of free trade in her day and praised its expansion. In a 1962 LA Times column she condemned a tariff bill proposed by President Kennedy that would give him “discretionary power to raise or lower tariffs, thus leaving the fate of countless industries at the mercy of his unpredictable favor.” (Her warning here sounds prophetic amid Trump’s tariffs.) In another column that year she praised the European Common Market for lifting their economies from wartime ruin by expanding free trade across their borders.
NI Staff
Itamar Feldman
